I said nothing.  She ceased her exposition immediately afterward, growing silent as suddenly as she had become discoursive.  It was rather as if she had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it.  I was quite at a loss as to what she was driving at.  There was a newness, a strangeness about her; sometimes she struck me as mad, sometimes as frightfully sane.  We had a meal somewhere—­a meal that broke the current of her speech—­and then, in the late afternoon, took a by-road and wandered in secluded valleys.  I had been ill; trouble of the nerves, brooding, the monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess.  I had an errand in this part of the world and had been approaching it deviously, seeking the normal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to my old self.  I did not wish to think of how I should get through the year—­of the thousand little things that matter.  So I talked and she—­she listened very well.

But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last, I myself brought the talk round to the Fourth Dimension.  We were sauntering along the forgotten valley that lies between Hardves and Stelling Minnis; we had been silent for several minutes.  For me, at least, the silence was pregnant with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run in currents between man and woman.  The sun was getting low and it was shadowy in those shrouded hollows.  I laughed at some thought, I forget what, and then began to badger her with questions.  I tried to exhaust the possibilities of the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque suggestions.  I said:  “And when a great many of you have been crowded out of the Dimension and invaded the earth you will do so and so—­” something preposterous and ironical.  She coldly dissented, and at once the irony appeared as gross as the jocularity of a commercial traveller.  Sometimes she signified:  “Yes, that is what we shall do;” signified it without speaking—­by some gesture perhaps, I hardly know what.  There was something impressive—­something almost regal—­in this manner of hers; it was rather frightening in those lonely places, which were so forgotten, so gray, so closed in.  There was something of the past world about the hanging woods, the little veils of unmoving mist—­as if time did not exist in those furrows of the great world; and one was so absolutely alone; anything might have happened.  I grew weary of the sound of my tongue.  But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on me the effect of some incredible stimulant.

We came to the end of the valley where the road begins to climb the southern hill, out into the open air.  I managed to maintain an uneasy silence.  From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to a clear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception—­allegory, madness, or whatever it was.  She certainly forced it home.  The Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable.  They were to come